Rosters Set For Maroon-White Scrimmage

David Murray

03/27/2008

Mississippi State has wrapped up the work portion of spring. Now comes play, as the Bulldogs conclude the session with the Maroon-White scrimmage. Only Coach Sylvester Croom hopes the boys play, well, nice. "As much as anything it's to give the fans a little preview, let the guys show a little bit of what they've done this spring. But our main objective is to get that done and leave healthy."

To wit, Saturday's public scrimmage (noon, Scott Field, CSS tape delay telecast) will be fast and, the coaches hope, not too furious. The split squads will go full-contact of course, but by accelerating the process Croom intends to minimize opportunities to add to the injury list from spring. State had no serious damage done in the first 14 dates of 2008 camp; the goal is to keep it that way by around 1:00 Saturday.

"J.B. Grimes will coach the Maroon team and David Turner will be head coach of the White team," Croom said. The Maroon team is the number-one offense and defense. "We'll use the same format we did last year, we'll go four 12-minute quarters, the clock won't stop except for an injury or timeout. We'll have a five-minute halftime, we won't tackle the quarterback and we won't kick off."

If this sounds rather tame to fans of the traditional spring ‘game' format, Croom and staff have good reasons to limit risk to the varsity and take the chance of starters spending a good portion of summer in re-hab, not in conditioning work. Already a number of players on these rosters will not participate for injury or illness. Those expected to miss action Saturday include WLB Dominic Douglas, HB Christian Ducre, QB Josh Riddell, CB Anthony Johnson, DE Tim Bailey, LB Karlin Brown, WR O'Neal Wilder, FB Eric Hoskins, FB Arnil Stallworth, and DE Charles Burns. And OC Johnny Carpenter is recuperating from week-one shoulder surgery.

Thursday's practice was not much longer than the spring scrimmage should last. The team spent about 90 minutes work almost entirely on aspects of kicking, protection, coverage, and returns. It was a shorts-and-helmet day, too, because the Bulldogs already did their share of live hitting Tuesday at a real scrimmage (see that day's report for plays and statistics). Croom had yesterday to go over the video and he found it a fitting conclusion to the real coaching part of this camp.

"We've had a good spring. I was very pleased with our last scrimmage, we've come a long way. We've got a long way to go but I leave the spring feeling we can develop into a good football team."

The rosters for the 2008 spring scrimmage are (non-participants still listed):